Good Girls Revolt, #MeToo and the fight to establish a cultural narrative for women
Last fall, I was invited to cover the press junket for Good Girls Revolt, a show produced by Amazon chronicling the plight of a group of women that filed a gender discrimination lawsuit against Newsweek in 1970.
At the time I was just six months into my first job as a professional journalist and initially disregarded the email since I don’t cover entertainment. I had never been to a junket, nor did I have experience interviewing celebrities. But the show is about two of my favorite things — journalism and gender equality — so I couldn’t resist. I decided to attend with the intention of shopping around a freelance piece about how my experience as a woman in journalism was paved by the brave, brazen women portrayed in the show.
The series, based on Lynn Povich’s book “The Good Girls Revolt,” is a loosely fictionalized account of the efforts of Povich and her colleagues, a group of 46 young, aspiring journalists with hopes and dreams much like my own. Prohibited from becoming writers, they were instead relegated to researchers or copy editors serving at the beck and call of the male reporters and editors that ran the newsroom. Every day they were objectified, taken advantage of and viewed as sexual conquests rather than equals. Exasperated, they decided they had endured enough.
I met with the cast and showrunners one crisp morning last October at the Crosby Hotel in New York City, and then a few days later I sat down with Povich and Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of The New York Times, before a panel discussion they were doing for the show. I wrote my article, sent it around, and received a couple nibbles of interest.
This was a week before the presidential election. I was bristling with excitement at the concept of seeing the first woman in the White House, one who would continue to advance the work of leaders like Povich and Abramson that fought so tirelessly for equality in their newsrooms.
Of course, as we all know, that didn’t happen.
I never heard back from the publications that expressed interest and I forgot completely about the article. In December, as the women who dreamt that a Clinton victory would be affirmation for years worth of fighting attempted to pick themselves back up, Amazon announced it was canceling Good Girls Revolt. I wasn’t particularly surprised. If the country couldn’t handle outspoken women at its helm, why would a group of white male television executives choose to put them on screen?
The revolt wages on
Ten months after the cancellation of the show, news broke of sexual assault allegations made against Miramax president Harvey Weinstein — a product of the incredible work of female investigative reporters, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey. A few weeks later, amid a flurry of accusations against men across industries, Amazon announced the resignation of Roy Price, the head of Amazon Studios, for claims of sexual harassment — the same man behind the cancellation of Good Girls Revolt.
In a twist of fate, later that week, a report surfaced that employees at Newsweek are planning to issue yet another gender discrimination lawsuit against the publication for discriminatory practices. Nearly 50 years after Povich and her colleagues issued their lawsuit, it was as if nothing had changed.
Suddenly it felt like the world needed this show more than ever. I couldn’t stop thinking about the discussions I had last fall. As Rebecca Traister pointed out, not only are men wantonly groping women and taking advantage of them, they were are also setting the cultural narrative and determining which stories are told in the media and on film.
Beyond its depiction of a major historical moment for women in media, what set Good Girls Revolt apart was that it was a show that was largely written, produced and starred by women. Six out of eight members of the production team were female, as well as a majority of the entry level staff.
Anna Camp, who played Jane on the show, told me last October this imbued a sense of ease on set, particularly during a scene in which her character loses her virginity. Having a woman behind the camera, who understood the intimate sense of vulnerability and fear in a formative moment of that magnitude, was reassuring for Camp.
“This show is about women coming together and finding their voice, and standing up for themselves,” Camp said. “If young girls watch the show, and they say, I want to be like that, I want to stand up for what’s right, I think we’re doing our job.”
In both the acting and the writing, there’s a sense that the women behind the scenes are performing from a place of experience, as was the case for head writer Dana Calvo and executive producer Lynda Obst.
As an award-winning journalist at The Los Angeles Times, Calvo was covering foreign policy and politics when she met her husband, then a fellow reporter at the Times. When the leadership team offered him a promotion that would require him relocating for a one-person posting, they assumed Dana would become a homemaker. As she told me last year, the editors told her point blank “Why don’t you pack up the house and follow him out there?”
“A female editor pulled me into her office and said they would never ask a man to resign from his job and follow a woman who is being groomed for management, ever,” she said. “When she put it in those terms I realized she was absolutely right and that’s what gave me the courage to go in there and say I want a contract.”
For Obst, who left journalism to take a stab at screenwriting in Hollywood in the early 1980s, she experienced her first taste of discrimination while helping to cast a CIA agent for a film. While helping to select the actress, her male colleagues began suggesting models. When she countered with an Academy-award winning actress, one responded with “We can’t do that, we would never fuck her.”
“I remember sitting in that chair thinking, I can’t make a face,” Obst recalled at a panel discussion for the show last year. “Because if I make a face now, I’m not going to be invited back to this meeting.”
Fueled by several years of pushing through the Boys Club of Hollywood, once Obst found Povich’s book she knew she needed to to bring it to the small screen.
It turned out she wasn’t the only one clamoring to bring the book the life. Joy Bryant — who plays American Civil Liberties lawyer Eleanor Holmes Norton, the real life woman who helped the ladies at Newsweek with their suit — read Povich’s book five years ago and wanted nothing more to play Norton in an adaptation of the book someday.
“The women’s liberation movement was predominantly white, and dealt with issues of middle-aged white women,” Bryant told me last year. “We all our sisters in arms, but there are still so many disparities. As women, If we don’t get that intersectionality we’re not going to be liberated at all. If one sister’s not free, we’re all not free.”
Bryant — who recently shared that she is the product of a man raping her mother when she was 15-years-old — has long been a proponent of body positivity and feminism. Portraying Holmes, who galvanized the women of Newsweek, and bridged the tenuous gap between women’s rights and black rights, was a dream job. In Povich’s book, Norton shares her experience encouraging women of color at the paper to fight for their rights not just as black women but as females.
“There was great confusion in the black movement at that time,” Norton said. “We were in the throes of the civil rights movement. For black women to make that transition — to make a partnership with white women, who were among the most privileged in society — was uncomfortable for them.”
The media gap widens
When I first met Povich, the first thing I could think to do was thank her. For writing her book, for forging a path for writers like myself, and for allowing the world to witness an account of her experience in Good Girls Revolt. By the time I found my niche as an editor on my high school paper, and later the college paper at the University of Michigan, I had taken my ability to see my name in print for granted.
Sitting across from Povich, I couldn’t fathom having my own voice stifled, of doing the grunt work of reporting and researching, only to fork it over to a man to weave the pieces together and slap his name on it. Povich worked alongside iconic writers like the late Nora Ephron, who rose from the ranks of mail girl at Newsweek to become a researcher, ultimately leaving the magazine for The New York Post, a publication where she would actually be allowed to write.
“Women do so well at school and so well at college. Then they get into the workforce and they’re getting good jobs, but then they realize about a year or two in that they’re not moving ahead as fast, or not getting as good assignments or not getting paid fairly,” Povich told me. “That’s when they realize that there is something going on here, there is systematic discrimination that’s still exists.”
Despite the strides made by the women of Newsweek, women in media, particularly women of color, are still vastly underrepresented. According to the 2017 American Society of News Editor census, women comprise just 38.9 percent of newsroom leaders. Further, men receive 62 percent of bylines and credits in print, online, TV and newswires, and hold 84 percent of the Pulitzer Prizes over the last century.
For the few women that do reach the top of newsrooms, they are rarely welcomed with open arms. Take Jill Abramson, who was unceremoniously ousted from her position as the first female executive editor of the New York Times in 2013. Reports from anonymous employees in publications like The New Yorker and Politico described her as “pushy” and implicated she was dismissed due to issues she raised over inequities with her salary.
However, it’s undeniable that during her tenure she advocated for female leadership. Upon leaving the Times, she had helped bring the masthead to nearly 50 percent female, a percentage that has slipped since her firing. When I spoke with her last year, she confessed “there was not a tidal wave of support” for her efforts to implement higher levels of female leadership.
“Male power is just so ingrained in the culture. It is changing slowly. People who have power are not that eager to relinquish it,” she said.
It was a disappointing setback for myself and female journalists everywhere, but especially for Abramson who had spent most of her career working the way up the ranks. She told me about the telegram she received from China on her first day of work as The New York Times first female Washington bureau chief in 1997.
“I can hear the glass shattering all the way from Hong Kong,” it read. It was signed from Sandra Burton, Abramson’s first boss and mentor who had been the first bureau chief for Time in 1973, congratulating Abramson on becoming the first woman to take the helm for the Times.
‘On your knees hooker’
Revisiting Good Girls Revolt now, in the middle of the continuing onslaught of allegations and the downfall of several powerful men, is like putting a mirror up to the current state of our society. These 1970s professionals were conditioned to stay mum about unwanted grazes, lude comments and obscene behavior or else lose their jobs, in the same way as the countless women of the modern age, who are just now finding the courage and support to speak up.
A year before the #MeToo movement inspired thousands of women to share their stories on social media, the showrunners told me Good Girls Revolt was intended to instigate change.
“Even to this day, [when sexual harassment happens] it’s shocking and weird and you want to go crawl under a rock and analyze it and think, ‘Well he probably didn’t mean that,’” Darlene Hunt, an executive producer of Good Girls Revolt, said last year. ““That was true then and is almost as equally true now.”
As I read through my article from last year, I remembered how equally empowered and frustrated I felt upon writing the ending. For posterity, I decided to include my original ending here:
After speaking with Abramson, I gather my things and walk to the subway. As a I near the station, an unassuming-looking man in a fair isle sweater approaches me.
He mimes drawing a bow and arrow in my direction, gazing fixedly as I cross the street.
“On your knees, hooker,” he bellows.
Startled, I freeze under the muted lights of Madison Avenue. Clutching my reporter’s notebook, I quicken my pace, breaking in a cold sweat.
My, how much further we have to go.